Christopher Hitchens, if he were alive, would strongly consider eating his words or at least soften them a little, if he saw Trisha Bora on that winter night. She was drunk and came back to her hotel room with her friend, sozzled and starved. They ordered room service — orange chicken curry with rice, club sandwiches and lemon soda. After eating, she volunteered to put the dinner tray outside the room, and tottering up to the door, predictably lost her footing. Off went the tray, flying halfway across the corridor, splattering the hotel walls with orange gravy. Every breakable thing on the tray was broken. Instead of helping Trisha, her friend burst into a drunken hysterical laughter, sprawled on the carpet, hiccupping the words – ‘You had one job. You had one bloody job’. When Trisha woke up, hungover and destroyed, a story had formed in her head. And a book got written — What Kitty Did. Kitty (the protagonist, a 25-year-old journalist Ketaki Roy), too, has one job and she bungles it up.
The book is laced with humour and that is why we bring old Hitchens from his grave. “He really did it in for us lot when he pronounced in an article that women aren’t as funny as men. His theory (and I’m simplifying) — sociologically, humour comes to man’s aid when he needs to make an impression on a gal; whereas a woman doesn’t need to do the same because she already has his attention. I remember feeling annoyed when I read that because some of the funniest people I know are women.”
What Kitty Did Trisha Bora, Harper Collins pp.288, Rs 202
So is Trisha. She puts Kitty Roy, her protagonist, into a lot of trouble. The book begins like a chic-lit, with girl troubles like a wonky love life and a lousy paycheck. But then life changes when there is a death, and the book changes with it, to becoming a crime fiction. “We’ve all got into some kind of despicable soup in our twenties so I thought — why not have a young girl moaning her balls off about her petty millennial problems and take it up a notch by really making it even harder for her — where love takes a breather for a sec and the protagonist can really get her hands dirty. Even though this hybrid (chic-lit (your words not mine) + crime) has been done pretty successfully internationally, I wanted to mix up genres and try something new for the Indian reader,” Trisha says.
Coming to the writer, growing up in the tea gardens of Asssam and being in the middle of nowhere is what drew her to books. She wrote her first story as a seven-year-old when she found a tiger lounging on the garden swing — a one pager about how the tiger and she became best friends (and it would do all her homework). “This was before I’d heard of Calvin and Hobbes, and when I finally came across it, it felt like someone had stolen my entire childhood.” Seriously, Hitchens, what were you thinking?
